Last week, I discussed the Green Paper proposals on faith schools. This week, I want to turn to the role of universities.

Getting universities involved in schools has been an ongoing cross-party goal. Back in the very early days of academies, for example, Lord Adonis pressed vice-chancellors hard to get them to become sponsors. Education ministers, though, tend to have a contradictory view of higher education: on the one hand, they laud it for its potential in supporting schools; on the other, they are almost always dismissive of their efforts to date.

And that’s where these latest set of proposals come from. The Green Paper is high in principle and low in practice. The principle could not be more explicit: universities have potential to sponsor schools; they’re not doing enough at present; they should all do more; and if they don’t, then the government will take action, by denying universities the right to raise their fees above £6,000 (which requires permission from the regulator Offa, though no one has been denied it to date).

Ineffective spending

The government is right that universities’ track record on widening participation is weak. Next year, they will spend around £750m in this area in exchange for charging higher fees. In contrast to the pupil premium, the evidence base on effective spending is small, but it is very clear that much money is being spent ineffectively.

Moreover, the requirements on universities to publicise and be held accountable for their choices is weaker than for schools. This is a significant sum of money and the state is right to demand better outcomes from it.

But the trouble with a bald statement like “all universities should sponsor schools”, and arguing that this is the best use of these funds, is that the evidence for that is conspicuously lacking. Around 60 universities sponsor academies, and the data is variable - some, like King’s College London, are doing brilliant work, and some, like the University of Chester, less so (The University of Chester Academies Trust was ranked among the worst MATs in the country in 2015, and formally barred from taking on any new schools).

Reluctant sponsors

This isn’t really at all surprising - universities, for all their talents, are probably not the best people to answer the question of how to improve key stage 3 scores among low attainers, or how to address in school variation in English. It’s also easy to see how a university, pushed reluctantly into doing something it doesn’t really want to do, is unlikely to be the type of transformational sponsor that ministers want to see.

What’s more frustrating is that there are some really good examples of school-university collaboration working well. To my mind, universities have expertise in three areas: stretching activities for the highly able; careers advice or university entry, and - most notably - curriculum design and sequencing. The A-Level Content Advisory Board, for example, which redesigned the new A levels, was a great success and should be continuing, not closing down.

A demand for universities to up their game on a school curriculum at all stages really could be transformational.

Jonathan Simons is a former head of education in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Gordon Brown and David Cameron